Translation of one sub-section of an article published on Le Soir, the leading French language newspaper in Belgium: https://plus.lesoir.be/378115/article/2021-06-14/ethiopie-au-tigre-la-famine-annoncee-et-preparee-par-la-guerre-menace-350000. Full article in French attached.
Complaint to the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office
As information begins to circulate, questioning the behaviour of Ethiopian and Eritrean troops, justice is also taking action: in Brussels, on 2 June, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office received a file on various war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Tigray. Several Belgian victims of the war in northern Ethiopia had submitted to the prosecutor’s office testimonies of the summary executions of members of their families, whose property was also looted. The complainants claim that rape is used as a weapon of war and denounce ethnic persecution and mass executions. They also recall that in Belgium it is possible to try crimes against humanity even if they did not take place within the country, in the event that some of the victims are Belgian – hence, a file has been opened with the Federal Prosecutor’s Office.
This complaint of crimes against humanity and war crimes is all the more striking given that the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, which welcomed the reconciliation between Addis Ababa and Eritrea. The encouragement by the Nobel Prize committee had probably been premature, as it now appears that the new allies in Addis Ababa and Asmara had forged their reconciliation in the face of a common enemy, the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front. The latter, in charge of Ethiopia for nearly twenty years, had been accused by other regions of this federal and multi-ethnic state of favouring its region of origin Tigray, which had indeed experienced remarkable development after having been hard hit by the famines of the end of the century due to drought and to the indifference of Addis Ababa.
Emnet Negash 